"A Hundred Ways"

Readings

"The Summer Day"
By Mary Oliver

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean -- the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down,
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms, and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.

I don't know what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

 

By Rumi

Today, like every day, we wake up empty and frightened.
Don’t open the door to the study and begin reading.
Take down a musical instrument.
Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are a hundred ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

 

Sermon:

It’s so good to have Rev. Michael back with us this morning. It’s what we’ve been praying for – those of us who pray.

This is an edgy topic for Unitarian Universalists.  Maybe, like me, you first learned that prayer was an on-your-knees, speaking to God-of-the-Universe type of communication. How many of you were taught to pray this way in childhood? For me, it happened in my Presbyterian church, at bedtime and before meals. Once I became an adult, I put away prayer, along with other childish things.

Then I served nine months as a chaplain at San Francisco General Hospital. I knew I would have to figure something out about prayer, and quick. People were dying there, and in pain. They would want me to hold their hands and speak to God on their behalf. How could I do so authentically?

In about my second week on the job, I poked my head into the Intensive Care waiting room. A man and woman were there, looking stunned. I introduced myself as a chaplain.

Before I could say another word, the man exploded in frustration. “I don’t believe in prayer!” he shouted at me. “To ask God for what you want is like asking Santa Claus to bring toys at Christmas!”

I soon learned what it was that this man wanted, and he wanted it with every fiber of his being. His son, a beautiful young man in his 20s, had been found by police on a sidewalk where he had landed after falling or being pushed from the roof of a two-story building. He was in a coma, and the doctors did not yet know how bad it was. Unknowingly, I’d walked right into the middle of a desperate conversation this father was having with himself about what one should, shouldn’t, could, couldn’t ask of God.

I listened to him and his wife talk about their son: their fear, their hope, their great love for their boy.

I think we get mixed up thinking that once we’ve rejected the idea that God is a person like us, that there is nobody or nothing we should be speaking to. I’ve come to think that when we are speaking from the true center of our being – the way this mother and father were in the hospital that day – that this is prayer, wherever it is directed. That the listening is prayer also.

The previous week – my first in the hospital – I’d called on a young man in General Medicine. He was sitting up in bed with a laptop and a Blackberry; he was speaking into a telephone, but he waved me into the room and ended his phone call so we could talk.

His challenge was a little different. “How can you possibly pray for me, Chaplain?” he asked. “You don’t even know me. You don’t know anything about my life.”

“That won’t stop me from praying for you,” I tried gamely, but now, after years spent pondering this encounter – a pondering that I also equate with prayer, by the way -- I think that what I might have said was, “If you tell me about yourself, then I’ll know something about you.” Often as not, the telling and the listening are the very prayer a person needs. This telling because it matters: a life, the particularity and the details. Telling it affirms that it matters. Listening, too, because it matters.

John Shelby Spong, the retired Episcopal bishop often accused of being a Unitarian, has a broad definition of prayer, one that actually makes it conceivable that a religious liberal could live Paul’s injunction to “pray without ceasing.”

"Prayer is what I am doing," Spong wrote, "when I live wastefully, passionately, and wondrously and invite others to do so with me or even because of me."

Many of us grew up reading prayers in church, or saying them from memory. “Now I lay me down to sleep.” “Our father, who art in heaven.” Some of us get stuck on what we may experience as the empty speaking of words by rote. The recently published letters of Mother Theresa indicate that even the “saint of the gutters” felt that as a great void at prayer time.

This shifted for me a few years back, when I came to look forward to chanting the metta sutta at the close of daily zen meditation at the Faithful Fools Street Ministry. “May all beings be happy. May they be joyous and live in safety. All living beings, whether weak or strong, in high or middle or low realms of existence, may all beings be happy …” As I became familiar with the phrases, these words sank into my being. I began to feel I was living them as well as saying them.

“I don’t know what a prayer is,” said the poet, “but I do know how to pay attention.” Her portrait of close attention to a summer day ends with the riveting question, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

When we pay attention -- to each other, to a grasshopper, to our own tears, to the words we chant every day by memory, even to the political process, and what we can do to affect it – the way our LGBT group, VaRUUM, is bird-dogging the non-discrimination bill now in Congress. Please stop by their table and write a letter today – when we pay attention in any of these ways, we are living fully, and that – I believe – is prayer. But it’s hard to do, and getting harder all the time. I remember in the early 1980s when the first of my friends got a telephone answering machine. There was Laura’s voice, telling me that Laura wasn’t there. I laughed myself silly. If you don’t pick up the phone, then I know you’re not there! Who needs a machine to tell me that? This would never catch on.

Now, like the young man I visited in the hospital that day, many of us have land lines with call waiting and cell lines and laptops and wireless this-and-that’s with which we can be in communication with several people at once, without being there.

I want to “be there” for my whole life the way the choir is when they sing, the way our dancers are when they let the music wash over them, and they move from the center of their being.

But what of speaking? What about the father’s question in the hospital waiting room? Can we legitimately ask for favors or for guidance from – something – God, a universe, a creative force -- in which we only half believe?

On my summer reading list was a book by Elizabeth Gilbert, “Eat Pray Love,” the story of a woman who spent part of a year eating in Italy and then moved on to praying in India. You’ll want to know that the love part comes next in Bali, but prayer is our subject here. And the author’s prayer life had actually begun some months before, on the floor of her bathroom in New York, where she retreated every night to cry her eyes out, agonizing over when and how to end her marriage.

One night as she sobbed, she began talking to – an Other. To God. “Tell me what to do. Tell me what to do. Tell me what to do,” she begged, over and over. Finally she stopped crying; she had cried wastefully, passionately, wondrously, and for that moment she was finished. And then, she heard a voice. Not Charlton Heston, just a voice. And it said, “Go back to bed, Liz.” And so she did.

What might we expect when we ask for answers? When we put ourselves fully into the truth of our experience of the moment, maybe we can expect to hear – the next step. It’s the middle of the night. Go back to bed. The next step. Not the whole magilla.

And don’t ask me where that voice came from. That’s the whole magilla, and I don’t have the answer to that. But I’ve heard it too, a voice, or something like a voice, guiding me in the direction of what’s next. From the center of my being? Where lives a sacred spark? From – somewhere else? I live in the mystery, grateful for the mystery.

I’ve heard that 14 percent of people who say they do not believe in God, pray anyway. “Hear my prayer, O God who does not exist!” is the way one poet tried it. “Thou art so great that thou art mere idea.”

When I first learned to pray out loud as an adult, I was troubled by the question of “who art in heaven?” My first, halting prayers were addressed this way: “O Flame” “O blade of grass.” There are no words for the whole of the mystery I speak into, so some piece will have to suffice. This is a lot like life. We are so complex inside.  Any speaking, any acting that I do in the world, is bound to be a flicker, a blade of grass in the field of Ultimate Truth.

So it is when I call that mystery by one of the many names of God. Partial. An attempt. A casting into the silence. What I need in that moment is to hear my own voice speak. This creates a shift inside myself, a shift that begins to wake me up so I can pay attention to my life. So the creative process can unfold; so the Spirit can move in my hand, giving life the shape of justice; so I can make the beauty I love be what I do.   

The speaking comes from wanting, from yearning, and this changes with the circumstances of my life. Sometimes – like the father I visited in the Intensive Care waiting room -- all I want is for the person I love to be healed. Sometimes I want to understand why I am the way I am, why the world is what it is, what I should do next. Sometimes I want to get closer to something my senses and my mind recognize as “truth;” I want to try, however haltingly, to name it. And sometimes all I want is to say “thank you.” “Thank you.” “Thank you.”

Benediction

May you be happy. May you be joyous and live in safety. May you walk from the center of your being, and may you be there for your whole life, every moment of your wild and precious life. Amen.

SOURCES and INSPIRATIONS

Gilbert, Elizabeth. Eat Pray Love.

Lamott, Anne. Traveling Mercies.

Spong, John Shelby. Why Christianity Must Change or Die.

All good poetry, but especially the poetry of Rumi and Mary Oliver.

“Metta Sutta”

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